Same Kind of Different As Me (14 page)
While everbody else was fallin in love with em, I was what you call skeptical. I wadn’t thinkin nothin evil. It was just that they didn’t look like the type to come in and mess with the homeless. People like that may not feel it within themselves that they’re better than you, but when you the one that’s homeless,
you
feel like they feel like they’re better than you.
But these folks was different. One reason was they didn’t come just on holidays. Most people don’t want the homeless close to em—think they’re dirty, or got some kinda disease, or maybe they think that kind of troubled life gon’ rub off on em. They come at Christmas and Easter and Thanksgivin and give you a little turkey and lukewarm gravy. Then they go home and gather round their own table and forget about you till the next time come around where they start feelin a little guilty ’cause they got so much to be thankful for.
On Tuesdays, I started waitin till there wadn’t no line so I could get through real fast without talkin to that couple at all. But that didn’t mean I wadn’t watchin em.
It took
a couple of months before I noticed a real change in my heart, a heart that was feeling like it had been run through the short cycle in a microwave—warm on the outside but still a little cool in the middle. I was fairly certain something had happened when I began waking up on Tuesday morning, Mission Day, and felt the same chill of excitement as when I woke up on Saturdays at Rocky Top. It wasn’t a raising-the-dead caliber miracle or anything. But folks who knew me would have classified it as a minor one. At least.
My own take on the topic was that maybe—just maybe—God had also rung my number when He called Deborah. On days when nothing else pressed, I found myself dropping by the mission. Soon, the fellows in the hood started to recognize my dirty-green crew-cab truck, and when they saw me pop out of the tunnel on East Lancaster Street, they’d slip their paper-bag-wrapped liquor bottles behind their backs and wave at me like I was a neighbor coming home from work.
Sometimes I ventured into the streets, places where even in broad day-light, young women wandered by like death in blue jeans, offering sex for cigarettes. Or for a ride home to steal mama’s TV and pawn it at Cash America. I hoped just to lend an ear, be an example. Sometimes, I stayed closer to the mission where some sunny afternoons, I’d sit on the curb in the shade of a vacant building and chat. One fellow told me he’d been married a thousand times to a thousand beautiful women—all of them as rich as Oprah. Of course, he said, all of them had also stolen every dime he’d ever made, so he asked me if I could spare a smoke.
If I hung around long enough and concentrated on spotting a fellow who didn’t want to be spotted, I’d nearly always see Denver. But if I made a move toward him, he would move an equal distance away. The fact that I was now calling him by his real name seemed to do more harm than good. If anything, he seemed irritated, like he was mad that I now had it right.
The mission residents had by then dubbed Deborah “Mrs. Tuesday.” They liked her a lot. But she became convinced that it would take more than “like”—and more than our ladling macaroni and meat loaf—to gain their trust. Without that, she realized, our efforts might mean a full belly on Tuesday nights, but little in the way of real change. Her goal was changed lives, healed hearts
.
Broken men and women rejoining the ranks of the clean and sober, moving out to places of their own, spending Sundays in the park with their families.
She began to rack her brain about ways to bring a little joy into their lives. Her first idea: Beauty Shop Night. Deborah and her best friend, Mary Ellen Davenport, would go to the mission loaded down with makeup kits, hairstyling tools, perfumes, soaps, and every manicure and pedicure accessory ever invented. And the homeless women would come. Deborah and Mary Ellen would comb the lice out of their hair, then wash and style it with blow-dryers and curling tools. If a woman wanted a pedicure, Deborah and Mary Ellen would wash her feet, use pumice stones to scrub away callouses layered on by ill-fitting shoes, and paint her toenails in a feminine shade of red or pink. They did facials and makeovers and gave the women little makeup kits to keep. Sometimes, on these nights, a homeless woman, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, would remember what she looked like before her life went off course and begin to cry.
Then Deborah dreamed up movie night. It sounded silly to me, but on the first night at least fifty men showed up to watch a movie about the Brooklyn Tabernacle choir. The next Wednesday, the dining hall was completely packed—150 people. The third week, something miraculous happened: Instead of heading for the exits when the video screen went blank, grown men, crusty and battle-hardened, began weeping and asking for prayer. God somehow managed to transform the dining hall into a confessional. It wasn’t the movies that caused the metamorphosis. It was just the simple act of caring. The men began confiding in us things some of them had never told anyone—and truthfully some things I wish they’d never told us.
That spurred Deborah on to a new idea: birthday night. Once a month, we brought a giant, gorgeously frosted sheet cake and everyone, including “God’s people,” would be invited to eat some. Those with a birthday that month got two pieces. Some folks couldn’t even remember what month they were born, but we weren’t checking IDs. The cake was always a hit. So much so that people began having more and more birthdays it seemed—some every month. (During the twelve months we brought cake, some fellows at the mission aged twelve years.)
In the fall of 1998, the mailman delivered to our home an invitation that arrived with the junk mail but turned out to be a treasure. Our friend Tim Taylor was organizing “an outreach to the unreached”—that’s fancy talk for evangelism—in a downtown theater that occupied the top floor of a land-mark bar called the Caravan of Dreams.
Deborah and I had been to the Caravan, a smoky jazz and blues lounge owned by billionaire developer and Fort Worth renovator Ed Bass. But the bar had stayed hip while we had not, so it had been years since we’d dropped in. Still, Tim’s invitation gave Deborah an idea: We could drive down to the mission and pack our cars with people who would enjoy a liquor-free night on the town. Given Jesus’s habit of consorting with drinkers and gluttons, she didn’t see the venue as a problem.
The next day, we whipped up a flyer announcing the free concert, drove down to the mission, and tacked it up on a bulletin board next to one offering to buy poor people’s plasma.
The flyer didn’t say what band was playing, but the Caravan was no hole in the wall. Anyone who’d been in Fort Worth awhile knew it occasionally featured a marquee performer. I’m sure the mission folks were hoping B. B. King might show up.
Rain slicked the pavement as we pulled up to the mission that evening, me in my Suburban and Deborah in her Land Cruiser. Still, we had customers: about fifteen men and women standing on the shiny sidewalk dressed in their handout best.
Including Denver.
We were shocked to see him standing on the mission steps, solemn and rigid like the statue of a dictator. And he clearly meant to go with us: He was scrubbed so clean his ebony skin shone against a dark blue secondhand suit that almost fit. He stood alone, of course, at least twenty feet from anyone—which did not surprise us since the others always treated him like a bad dog on a long chain.
When I got out and opened the door to my Suburban, six men piled into the two backseats, leaving the front passenger seat vacant. No one wanted to sit near Denver, who had sourly observed the commotion of loading, yet had not made a move. For five solid minutes he stood there staring. I waited. Then, without a word, he stalked to the Suburban and slid into the front seat, inches from my elbow.
I had never been that close to him. I felt like Billy Crystal in the movie
City Slickers
, when he camps alone on the prairie with the menacing trail boss Curly, shivering as Curly sharpens his knife on a razor strop. To break the tension, I took a couple of stabs at trivial conversation, but Denver sat stock-still and silent, a sphinx riding shotgun.
As I eased down the street, the other fellows seemed happy to be riding in a car that wasn’t marked “Fort Worth Police Department” on the sides. They wanted to know all about it, the monthly payments, and whether I knew any other rich people.
Deborah followed in her Land Cruiser with a carload of ladies. In five minutes, we were through the tunnel and at the Caravan. We both parked and our guests spilled out, chattering and laughing, glad to be dressed up and in the other Fort Worth. We all paraded in, up the stairs to the theater where 250 seats sloped toward a small stage.
Except for Denver. I was acutely aware he had not come in. Everyone was seated and the show was about to begin, but I got up and went back downstairs. I found him standing on the sidewalk puffing on a cigarette.
“The concert’s about to start,” I said. “Don’t you want to come in?”
Smoke curled up around his dark head. I heard the spat-spat of rain off the eves. Denver said nothing. I posted myself just inside the Caravan door and waited. Finally, he walked past me and up the stairs, as if I were no more alive than a cigar-store Indian. I followed, and when he took an end seat on a row by himself, I sat down next to him.
Then I did something stupid: I smiled heartily and patted him on the knee. “Denver, I’m glad you came.”
He didn’t smile back, didn’t even blink, just stood up and walked away. At first, I was afraid to turn around, but later, as the concert began, I saw him out of the corner of my eye, sitting on the back row, alone.
That tore it.
He’s a nutcase
, I concluded,
not worth my trouble
. The man was definitely looking a gift-horse in the mouth.
Another thought nagged at me, though. Could it possibly be something he saw in me—something he didn’t like? Maybe he felt like the target of a blow-dried white hunter searching for a trophy to show off to friends, one he bagged after a grueling four-month safari in the inner city. Meanwhile, if I caught him, what would I do with him? Maybe God and Deborah had gotten their signals crossed. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be his friend.
The concert lasted a little less than two hours. Afterward, as we skirted shallow rain puddles on the way back to the cars, our guests thanked us profusely. All except for Denver, who hung back as usual. But when all the others had piled back in the cars, he walked up to me and spoke the first words I had ever heard come out of his mouth outside the dining hall.
“I want to apologize to you,” he said. “You and your wife been tryin to be nice to me for some time now, and I have purposely avoided you. I’m sorry.”
Stunned, I didn’t know what to say and didn’t want to say too much for fear he’d bolt again. So all I said was, “That’s okay.”
“Next time you is at the mission, try and find me and let’s have a cup a’ coffee and chat a l’il bit.”
“What about tomorrow morning?” was what came out when I opened my overeager yap. “I’ll pick you up and we’ll have breakfast together. How about me taking you to your favorite restaurant and I’ll treat.”
“I ain’t got no favorite restaurant,” he said, then added, “matter of fact, I don’t think I ever been to no restaurant.”
“Well, then I’ll choose one and pick you up at 8:30. Same place I drop you off.”
We climbed back into the Suburban and I sped back to the mission. I couldn’t wait to tell Deborah the news.
Like
I said, I’d been watchin Mr. and Mrs. Tuesday. They wadn’t like the holiday volunteers. They’d come ever week and talk to the homeless folks, and not seem to be afraid of em. Talked to em like they was intelligent. I started to think Mr. and Mrs. Tuesday might be tryin to do some real good ’stead a just makin themselves feel better ’bout bein rich.
So when they started talkin somethin ’bout goin down to the Caravan of Dreams, that got me interested. There was a lot of folks at the mission that respected me. I thought if I went that might encourage some others to go, too. Besides that, I had lived downtown ’fore them millionaires started fixin it up. I hadn’t seen a lot of them new buildings, and I thought I might like to go down there and check it out.
By that time, I had me a job workin in the clothing store at the mission. It wadn’t nothin but a warehouse that seemed a hundred years old, with boxes a’ clothes and shoes and such stacked up near as high as the lightbulbs hangin naked from the ceilin. When I heard about this trip to the Caravan, I grabbed the best suit that come through there that day. Picked it out special.
To tell you the truth, though, I was kinda hopin the cars would be full up, then I wouldn’t have to go. You know how it is when you tryin to do the right thing even though you really don’t wanna do it. Well, just my luck, God saved me a seat. All them men loaded theirselves into the big Suburban and which seat you think they left? The front one, right next to Mr. Tuesday. I just stood up on the steps, waitin and hopin somebody else’d come outta the mission, late and wantin to go to the Caravan ’stead a’ me.
Well, that didn’t happen, so I got in the car. Next thing I was hopin was that Mr. Tuesday wouldn’t say nothin to me. But that was about like hopin the sun wouldn’t come up, and of course he started right in. And then at the Caravan, not only would he not let me go on about my business, he had to haul off and put his hand on my knee! I guess he didn’t know I’d knocked men out for less.
I didn’t want him by me. I didn’t want nobody by me. I wanted to be by myself. So I got up and burned off. That was just my way.
But after a while, I started feelin kinda bad about that. I’d been watchin Mr. and Mrs. Tuesday, and I knowed they was serious about helpin folks. It would’ve been kinda ugly of me not to tell em I appreciated it. So after the concert let out, I waited for everbody to get in the cars. Then I edged over to Mr. Tuesday and apologized.
He said that was okay. Then I said maybe we could have some coffee at the mission.
Lord-a-mercy, did
that
open up a can a’ worms.
